


Safe Harbor

by StronglyLetteredWord



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Crowley Needs a Hug (Good Omens), Declarations Of Love, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, M/M, We’re all soft here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-06 20:37:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20513147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StronglyLetteredWord/pseuds/StronglyLetteredWord
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley steal a boat.





	Safe Harbor

“You can’t _steal_ a boat, Crowley,” Aziraphale whispers with a furtive look around the marina.

“I mean, technically, I _can,_ and any self-respecting demon _would,_ but for your sake, I will simply borrow it. Now come on, before someone sees and we have to miracle away their memory.”

Aziraphale hesitates only a moment more before accepting Crowley’s outstretched hand to pull him from the dock and up onto an expensive-looking speedboat. _This is a little ridiculous,_ Aziraphale thinks, and he tells Crowley so as the former agent of Hell—very recently unemployed—snaps his fingers to untie the mooring. 

“This was _your_ idea,” Crowley reminds him and starts the engine without a key. “Ooh, would you listen to that,” he laughs over the rumble. “It sounds fast.”

“You can’t hold me to everything I say after three bottles of champagne and two desserts,” Aziraphale protests, but the rev of the engine drowns him out as Crowley speeds away from land. The former agent of Heaven—also very recently unemployed—hangs on for dear life and hopes only his words will do any drowning this evening. If he gets discorporated for the second time in three days, Upstairs will no doubt be even less willing to issue him a new body than they were on Saturday.

Crowley, for his part, seems to be delighted by the speed and bound of the vessel over the choppy water. Aziraphale considers a ride in a death trap a small price to pay if it means Crowley can enjoy himself for even a few moments. The angel has enjoyed Crowley’s more relaxed demeanor since they’d pulled the wool over their former employers’ eyes, wings, and various appendages. Crowley has been more easygoing these past two days than he’s been in hundreds of years, maybe millennia: quicker to laugh, his mouth more likely to tip up into a fond smile, his loose posture less an affectation and more genuine relaxation. Aziraphale has been waiting for the other shoe to drop, but he quietly admits to himself that he loves to see Crowley thus, so he’d only put up a nominal protest when the demon had latched onto a silly comment he’d made at the end of a long meal, tipsy and giddy in the wake of the averted apocalypse and aforementioned wool-pulling.

The pair hadn’t parted company since they’d reunited in the park and switched their bodies back. Lunch at the Ritz had turned into dinner, had turned into examining every inch of the restored bookshop, had turned into a late-night drive in the restored Bentley, had turned into breakfast near the coast, then a walk, then another celebratory lunch where they watched wealthy humans, ignorant of the near miss their planet just had, pilot boats in and out of a marina. Crowley had commented on the humans’ ability to ignore even a major hiccough in the fabric of reality. Aziraphale had wondered if the rest of nature had been any more cognizant of the past week’s events. Crowley had wanted to find out.

Aziraphale now finds himself keeping a tight grip on anything solid and watching Crowley laugh out loud from where he stands behind the wheel and pushes the speed up even higher as they reach the open water. _I could certainly get used to seeing him like this,_ the angel thinks fondly when Crowley turns to grin at him, the pleasure on his face clear even obscured by dark lenses and fading sunlight.

A half moon is rising over the ocean when Crowley cuts the engine. “What do you reckon?” he asks Aziraphale.

“Only one way to find out, I suppose.”

The angel and the demon clamber over the side of the speedboat and walk across the surface of the water. Crowley struggles with balancing on his lanky legs as a wave rolls under them, throwing off the rhythm of his serpentine saunter. Aziraphale catches him by the elbow. 

“Hello,” he calls downward, going so far as to lean down, left hand on Crowley’s arm and right hand knocking on the surface of the ocean. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

They wait for a few moments until Crowley, whose night vision is better even with his sunglasses, points. “Look there,” he says.

A pod of dolphins have surfaced, several members eyeing the two supernatural entities with curiosity. The moonlight glistens on their smooth bodies as they twist and roll through the undulating waves. 

“Oh, hello,” Aziraphale greets them warmly. “We thought we’d just pop out here to give you a bit of an update on the goings-on on land. No doubt you’ve noticed some strange things—cities rising from the deep, and the kraken out in the Pacific, and so on.”

The nearest dolphin blinks lazily at them. Most others are jumping and playing and paying no attention to the two beings before them.

“Yeah, we just averted the apocalypse,” Crowley informs the pod. 

“Well, we helped a little, anyway,” Aziraphale concedes.

“Yes. You’re welcome. Frankly, you could look a little more impressed.”

The few dolphins who’ve bothered to listen look frankly unimpressed.

“Oi, don’t gimme that look,” Crowley says, affronted and with more bravado than he should have a right to, considering he’s now clinging to Aziraphale to keep his balance on the water made choppy by the dolphins’ antics. “We bloody well saved your lives, you ungrateful bastards. Go on and tell your friends.”

Aziraphale isn’t certain whether dolphins can roll their eyes (indeed, he wasn’t even aware they weren’t a type of fish until relatively recently), but he’s pretty sure that’s what he sees right before a nearby dolphin smacks the water with her fin, splashing Crowley in the face, who loses his balance, his grip on Aziraphale, and his concentration all at once and topples right into the water. When he surfaces, spluttering, he’s lost his sunglasses too. 

Aziraphale hauls Crowley up out of the water amid the high-pitched chittering of the pod (if eye rolling is in question, laughter certainly is not). “Well, it was nice to meet you,” he says when Crowley has got his feet under him. “Do send our best to the whales, as well. Er, have a lovely evening.”

Crowley spits out a mouthful of saltwater and glares from beneath the sodden red hair plastered to his forehead.

The dolphins set off toward the horizon, spinning and jumping in the moonlight, and the two man-shaped beings stagger back over the waves to their borrowed transportation, which, considering the bedraggled demon’s glower, has found it rather prudent not to drift too far from the pair.

They pull themselves up the ladder attached to the stern and collapse side-by-side onto expensive leather seats at the rear of the speedboat. “’Ooh, we should go see the dolphins. I’m sure they’ve been wondering what’s been going on the past few days,’” Crowley quotes mockingly. Aziraphale chooses not to admit to himself that the imitation is rather spot on.

Instead, he looks sidelong at Crowley and says, “Well, it could certainly have gone worse. At least they weren’t horses. You know how they always get tetchy around you.”

Crowley whips his head around, mouth already open to make a retort, but when his eyes meet Aziraphale’s and he clocks the angel’s smirk, his face relaxes into yet another easy smile and he shakes his head with a chuckle. Without the usual sunglasses obscuring half his friend’s face, Aziraphale can see the way the expression reaches his eyes. Aziraphale thinks of the day they met.

Crowley shifts in his seat now and pulls his wet shirt away from his torso with a grimace and a suppressed hiss. Aziraphale knows the demon has never been fond of water, holy or otherwise, and he no doubt had no intention of actually getting wet tonight. The angel snaps his fingers, and the ocean water miraculously rises as steam from Crowley’s clothes, skin, and hair.

“Ah, thanks,” Crowley sighs, tipping his head back to watch the tendrils of water vapor catch the moonlight and dissipate. He slouches further down in his seat, head resting on the low chair back, legs stretched out before him. It’s dark enough now that the last rays of sun have sunk into the horizon. The band of the Milky Way arches over them, and Crowley stares, unblinking, up at it.

Aziraphale watches Crowley watching the sky. He listens to the rhythmic lapping of the water against the side of the speedboat for a few minutes before he says quietly, “Can we see it from here?”

Crowley doesn’t ask what he means. Instead he pulls a slow lungful of salt air in through his nose. “Too far north,” he says on the exhale without looking at Aziraphale, expression neutral. “It’s part of what the humans call the constellation Centaurus, near the Southern Cross. Looks like one star from here, but it’s actually a binary system.”

Crowley lapses into silence again. Aziraphale thinks about binary stars, celestial bodies locked together forever, their light bleeding into one another until you can’t tell where one ends and the next begins. At length he says, “I owe you an apology.”

“Hm?”

“I suppose I can’t really say I’m sorry I didn’t go with you, although I would have if it came down to it. Our staying worked out for Earth in the end. But you were right. About a lot of things. And I was too afraid to listen until it was almost too late. So I’m sorry it took me so long to catch up with you.” Aziraphale wrings his hands in his lap.

Crowley glances at Aziraphale before turning his serpentine eyes back to the stars. “You got there in the end. ‘S all that matters,” he says with a shrug.

“Yes, well, I’m glad you didn’t leave Earth before I did get there.”

Crowley’s mouth pulls down into a tense line. Aziraphale, still watching him rather than the stars above them, sees him swallow thickly. “I wouldn’t have gone without you,” he admits, obviously aiming for nonchalance and missing entirely. “What would be the point?” This last is muttered, a confession, and not the first one Aziraphale has heard from Crowley these past few days. He’s heard them before, too, but has been too afraid of the repercussions for them both to allow himself to truly listen.

_“Anywhere you want to go.” _

_“Would I lie to you?”_

_“We could go off together.”_

_ “Stuff happened. I lost my best friend.”_

He doesn’t have to worry about repercussions anymore. Neither of them do. So he listens now. He listens with his whole being rather than his ears. He hones in, much like tuning the old wireless radio in the back corner of his bookshop, on the hum of the thing he’s been sidestepping and ignoring for so many years.

And there it is, just as always. The feeling he’d picked up in Oxfordshire was vague and staticky, the amorphous manifestation of a general fondness the eleven-year-old antichrist had for his stomping grounds. This now is sharp, electric, and constant: love.

It radiates from Crowley, directed right at Aziraphale’s core, like white-hot lightning. And now that Aziraphale has tuned in to the right frequency, so to speak, his own feelings arc back to the demon, creating a feedback loop, a gentle hum that rings through him like a deep chime.

It’s the work of a moment, and if Crowley notices, if he’s ever noticed Aziraphale tuning in like this, he doesn’t say anything. He’s still reclined in his seat, head tipped back to look at the stars, now without really seeing them, Aziraphale can tell. His jaw is set, and he seems a world away. Here now is the other shoe dropping. Crowley has been the one pushing them from celebration to celebration for two days without stopping to rest or reflect. He’s been running, Aziraphale realizes. He’s been running for so long, he doesn’t know how to stop, doesn’t know where it’s safe to land, even when they’ve finally won their freedom.

Many of Crowley’s life choices, especially in the last few years, have been motivated by fear of one kind or another. Aziraphale’s life has been motivated by fear, as well, but that fear has paralyzed him, kept him from making choices. The angel—encouraged by the electric pulse of love thrumming through him, still high on ordering a towel from the Archangel Michael, on facing down Satan and Gabriel, on leaving his platoon high and dry and zipping off to Earth in search of a body—decides being brave has done him a lot more good in the long run than his usual cowardice. So now he makes a choice for the two of them and does something very brave indeed.

He lifts a hand, slowly, like he doesn’t want to spook a wild animal, and cards his fingers through Crowley’s short hair, pushes it back from his forehead where the water had plastered it down. Crowley’s eyes are wide, the half moon reflected yellow in the irises. Every muscle in his body tenses. He stops breathing, and so does Aziraphale.

There is absolute silence for a moment, broken only by the lapping of the water against the boat. Aziraphale has just thought of excusing this act of insanity with, _You have a bit of seaweed, just there,_ when the truly miraculous occurs:

Crowley’s eyes drift shut. He lets out a shaky breath, and he leans into the touch.

It’s all the encouragement Aziraphale needs. He pulls Crowley toward him, and the demon twists his torso (in a way that would be uncomfortable for anyone else) and locks his arms around Aziraphale’s middle, buries his face in Aziraphale’s jacket. Aziraphale’s fingers work through Crowley’s hair; his other hand soothes over Crowley’s sharp shoulder blades where his wings are tucked away in another plane. Even so, Aziraphale can feel the answering twitch and ethereal rustle of feathers.

Crowley often teases Aziraphale for being so effusive, and while Aziraphale teases back that Crowley is secretly nice, Aziraphale can count on one hand the number of times in six thousand years he’s seen Crowley show that side of himself in such a physically demonstrative way. Until now, none of them had been while he was sober. Aziraphale is reminded of the last time, sometime in the fifteenth century, when he’d practically had to scrape Crowley off the floor of a dirty cantina in Spain. Crowley had clung to Aziraphale as he is now and slurred out a few choice words for humans in general, the Inquisition in particular, and “those idiots Below” for good measure. He’d finally fallen asleep without sobering up, propped up against Aziraphale, who’d miracled them to Crowley’s lodgings and left him to sleep it off. He’d let Crowley pretend he didn’t remember the evening when they’d seen each other again in pursuit of their Arrangement some months later.

This, now, is new territory, this vulnerability without the excuse of drunkenness. For several long minutes, no one speaks. Crowley fists his hands in the back of Aziraphale’s jacket. His arms are tight enough to crack Aziraphale’s ribs. Every line and angle of Crowley’s body is rigid, even contorted as he is in the small seat of the speedboat. Aziraphale waits. Crowley has waited for Aziraphale to get his head on straight for hundreds, thousands of years, so Aziraphale will sit here, bobbing on the waves in this little boat, for as long as Crowley needs. If Crowley has been set adrift by a hurricane of panic, and then grief, and then terror, and then sheer relief, Aziraphale will be safe harbor. He anchors Crowley with soothing hands through his hair, over his shoulder blades, down his back, over and over, until bit by bit, Crowley relaxes into him without loosening his hold.

Aziraphale waits.

Finally, Crowley’s breath hitches. He buries a stuttering exhalation in Aziraphale’s well worn waistcoat. When Crowley speaks, the words are ground out through clenched teeth, as if he can hold back the tide of grief through physical barrier alone. But the dam breaks along with his voice, and his words spill out. “I couldn’t go without you. You were gone. You were _gone._ Everything was burning, and you weren’t there. I couldn’t sense you anywhere. I didn’t know if it was the Archangels or if Hastur and Ligur got to you first. If it was hellfire—what’s the point of running off on my own if you were—because I wasn’t fast enough or good enough—” Crowley seems to choke on his own words here, as if he thinks he’s said too much, and the rest of his thoughts are swallowed by the silent, breathless sobbing of lonely hopelessness.

Aziraphale shushes nonsense words into Crowley’s hair and holds him all the more tightly. He rocks them both in time with the boat and tries with little success to blink away his own tears until he can find his voice. “You’re good enough,” he says with conviction even as his voice breaks. “You’ve always been good enough. I’m here. Shh, I’m here. I came back to you, and you got us through it. You’re so good. We’ll be fine now, I promise. I don’t deserve you, Crowley, my love, but I swear I’ll never leave you again, not as long as you’ll have me. I swear it. Shh, I swear it.”

Crowley takes a heaving breath when his brain seems to catch up with Aziraphale’s words. He pulls back far enough to see Aziraphale’s face without having to let go. He’s forgotten his eyes, yellow bleeding over white and reflecting the half moon again as they widen in naked astonishment. “Wh-what did you call me?” he asks in hushed tones.

“Good.”

“N-no. No, the other thing.”

Aziraphale thinks back over his speech and then smiles at the endearment he’d let slip. Years upon years of holding it back, burying it in his thoughts, and here it has finally slipped past his lips to smooth over the demon’s grief. He cups his hands around Crowley’s jaw and swipes the tears away with his thumbs. Crowley’s mouth slackens in further surprise. “My love. There’s no danger in saying it now, surely? Only I was so afraid of what they’d do to you if I said it aloud and the wrong sort got wind of it before.”

“You what?” is Crowley’s inarticulate reply. His eyes rake over Aziraphale’s face, searching for something.

Aziraphale thinks it must be better to show him, so he closes his eyes and concentrates until his connection to Crowley extends beyond their physical touch. He focuses on that reverberated hum of reciprocal love deep within him until Crowley’s gasp tells him the demon can feel it too.

When Aziraphale opens his eyes, one of Crowley’s hands has risen to cover Aziraphale’s against his own jaw. The other remains fisted in the angel’s jacket. “What is that? _Aziraphale._ What is that?”

He must know, of course, but Aziraphale answers anyway. He’s spent far too long Not Saying Things to deny Crowley this now. “That’s love. That’s us. You and me on our own side and finally on the same page.”

Crowley closes his eyes. Silent tears escape his lashes, and Aziraphale wipes them away again. “I haven’t felt anything like that since—since—” _Since before the Fall,_ he doesn’t say. Since he was cut off from Divine Love and the ability to preternaturally sense even the mundane version like angels can.

“But you have,” Aziraphale assures him. “You’ve been feeling it _at_ me for a very long time, my love.”

Crowley makes a little broken noise in the back of his throat at the repeated endearment.

Aziraphale tugs him forward again, this time to say again, “My love,” and to press a gentle kiss to Crowley’s forehead. A human gesture, to be sure, but they’ve rather thrown their lot in with the humans at this point, haven’t they? “My love,” he says, and kisses each eyelid. “My love,” and kisses a cheek. “My love,” and kisses his jaw. “My—mmf.” Aziraphale’s words have been cut off by the desperate crash of Crowley’s lips against his.

Oh. 

Oh, well, he could get used to this.

Crowley’s mouth is a firm line against his lips, but it softens after a moment when Aziraphale melts into him and returns the kiss. Someone lets a sigh huff out through his nostrils. Someone tips his head at a new angle and tastes the pleasured moan this elicits in the other. Aziraphale doesn’t know who does what anymore. Were they ever two separate entities? They were _made_ for each other. The love thrumming between them burns white-hot at their cores like a sun, like binary stars, and lights up every atom. Their corporations’ human hearts beat like wings asking to be free of their ribcages. Their _actual_ wings rustle and stretch, intangible, around one another.

They break apart after several long, glorious moments, but only far enough to breathe, the air fogging between them in the evening chill. Hands grasp at elbows, snake through white-blond curls and stroke the shells of ears. Foreheads and hip bones touch; knees and feet tangle together. Aziraphale has spent centuries skirting around an aching chasm of longing, and now that they’ve bridged the gap, the angel, ever the glutton, doesn’t want to let go, can’t stop now.

Crowley seems to be of the same mind. His head dips to Aziraphale’s throat—_Oh, good Lord,_ Aziraphale thinks—and tastes the pulse there. “Please, angel,” he begs, a supplicant at Aziraphale’s Adam’s apple. “Please, I love you, angel. Please.”

Aziraphale doesn’t know what he’s asking for. _Love me. Stay with me. Touch me._ It doesn’t matter, because the angel’s answer to everything is, at long last, “Yes, my love. Yes. I love you. I’ll love you always,” and he tips Crowley’s face up to capture his lips again.

Hours or centuries or eons later—Aziraphale, in this newfound bliss, neither knows nor cares—the pair is stretched out on the bow of the speedboat, rocking gently under what stars haven’t yet faded into the blue-black of predawn. Aziraphale has folded his jacket into a makeshift bolster under his head. Crowley has tucked himself against Aziraphale’s side and is using him as both pillow and personal space heater. He has one arm snaked between Aziraphale’s waistcoat and button down for extra warmth. Crowley is boneless against him, finally having given over to the physical and emotional exhaustion wrought by Armageddon and all that has come after.

Aziraphale feels Crowley waking by degrees as the first pink of dawn blushes against the horizon. The demon stretches his long legs and, sleep-addled, cracks one fully yellow eye. Aziraphale watches him take in the beige and blue and tartan of his makeshift bed before he shuts the eye again and tenses ever so slightly.

“Did I dream it?” Crowley all but whispers, voice raspy with sleep.

Aziraphale answers by way of a kiss to the top of Crowley’s head. “Good morning, my love,” he says, and all the tension bleeds out of the demon again.

Crowley lifts his head to prop his chin on Aziraphale’s sternum and meets his gaze, irises reined in to their customary appearance and mouth already tipping up into an easy smile. “I could get used to hearing that,” Crowley says, and Aziraphale quite agrees with the sentiment.

“We should return our ‘borrowed’ boat to the marina. And then where? Breakfast? Or do you want to pop over to the jungle to visit the gorillas next?”

Crowley chuckles. “Nah,” he says. “Let’s go home.” Then he stretches up to kiss Aziraphale on the mouth before leaping from the bow to start the engine. “Hang on tight, angel. Let’s see how fast we can go.”

As Crowley steers them gleefully and rapidly toward the distant shore, the sun rises on the third day of the rest of their lives. A new eternity stretches out before them, and angel and demon will meet it—at last, fully—together.

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be something short and silly about Crowley mouthing off to a dolphin and falling in the water, but I'm soft.


End file.
